Technical Field
This disclosure relates generally to instruction processing and more specifically to specifying instruction operands.
Description of the Related Art
Instructions typically specify an operation to be performed with reference to one or more sources. For example, an add instruction may indicate addition of sources A and B. For some instructions, sources may share operands. For example, the add instruction may indicate addition of register r1 to register r1, in which case both sources A and B receive an operand from r1. Determining when sources share operands may consume significant power. For example, the determination may involve comparing all address bits of each operand. Operands may have fairly large addresses, especially in the context of graphics processing, for example.